“If a woman leaves her husband, she is then not free from him, nor he from her; for a marital union having once been established, remains a union for all eternity.” (“De Homunculis.”)
That which nourishes a thing, goes to make up its substance. The physical body receives its nutriment from the physical plane, the soul is nourished by the influences coming from the soul of the world, the intellect is nourished, grows and expands in the intellectual plane; an ill-fed body becomes diseased; a soul living on morbid desires and inordinate longings becomes depraved, a mind fed with false theories, errors and superstitions becomes dwarfed, perverted and unable to turn its face towards the sunlight of truth. The food for soul and mind is as substantial to them as material food is substantial to the material body; body, soul, and spirit being three states of the eternal One, manifested on three different planes of existence, being governed by only one fundamental law. What the stomach is in the body, the memory is in the mind. Both are related together; a dyspeptic stomach causes a defective memory and an irritable mind; an irritable temperament causes indigestion and forgetfulness; forgetfulness can cause inattention, irritability and dyspepsia. Soul, body and mind are one in man, and disorders existing in one can cause impurities in the other; each passion in man, each superstition in which he firmly believes, is capable of poisoning his body and of producing a certain disease. A belief in salvation made easy renders a man indolent, indolence causes want of self-control, which causes want of resistance to injurious influences in the physical plane. Repeated physical misfortunes may make a man a coward, and his cowardliness prevents him from letting go of a doctrine which he intuitively known to be false. Anger is not only injurious to bodily health, but drives away reason by confusing the mind; wrath causes not only mental but also physical shortsightedness, and hard-hearing is often the only cause of a suspicious character.
Thus innumerable comparisons may be drawn and analogies be found, and cases cited to prove the correctness of this theory, if our space would permit it, and if it were necessary to prove by arguments and facts the truth of the unity of the all, which must be self-evident to everyone taking the trouble to seek for the answer to such questions within himself.
But the highest cannot act upon the lowest without an intermediary link connecting them, the spirit cannot act upon the body without the connecting link of the soul, nor the soul upon the body except by means of the life. We cannot cook a dish of soup for a starving beggar by means of the fire of love; but love moves the will and induces actions which the mind directs, and thus the soup may be cooked after all owing to the power of love or charity. The greatest difficulty in the understanding of occult laws arises from the circumstance that we cannot perceive remote causes or seek to connect them with ultimate effects without being able to see through the intricate network of intermediary causes between the two ends.
III.—Ens Naturae.
Diseases which have their origin in certain conditions inherent in the constitution of man.
Man is a perfect child of nature. There is not a single essence in his constitution which does not exist in nature; neither is there any substance or power to be found in nature which does not exist in him, either actually or potentially, undeveloped or developed.
“There are many who say that man is a microcosm; but few understand what this really means. As the world is itself an organism with all its constellations, so is man a constellation (organism), a world in itself, and as the firmament (space) of the world is ruled by no creature, so the firmament which is within man (his mind) is not subject to any other creature. This firmament (sphere of mind) in man has its planets and stars (mental states), its exaltations, conjunctions and oppositions (states of feelings, thoughts, emotions, ideas, loves and hates), call them by whatever name you like, and as all the celestial bodies in space are connected with each other by invisible links, so are the organs in man not entirely independent of each other, but depend on each other to a certain extent. His heart is his
, his brain his